NEW YORK CITY (WOMENSENEWS)— Anna Limontas-Salisbury says her son Serge Salisbury is a normal teenager in “Bed-Stuy,” the name New Yorkers commonly give to Bedford Stuyvesant, the majority black and Hispanic neighborhood in north central Brooklyn.

He plays video games; always involving sports, never first-person shooter. His mom says any sort of violence has always made him uncomfortable. He’s a quiet kid with a kind heart, she says. Just after his 12th birthday, Serge started taking the train for just over 40 minutes to school by himself. She would watch him cross the street in the morning.

“He’s the youngest, we baby him,” she says.

Through the phone, you can feel the warmth and love she feels for her son, who is now 15.

Limontas-Salisbury, a teacher and freelance journalist who contributes to Women’s eNews, among other places, laughs when she talks about her son’s wardrobe. He’s always worn hoodies to school. “My biggest problem was always, ‘my goodness, how many hoodies can we buy from Old Navy that you’re going to lose over the year?’ ”

She remembers the first moment that his wearing of the garment gave her a pang. In the spring of 2012, she watched him flip his hood on his head on his morning trek to the train stop. “I was panicking, ‘don’t put that hoodie on!’ It was kind of shocking to have that kind of reaction,” she says. “Just to see him walking across the street and thinking, he could look like anybody from behind.”

Trayvon Martin.

Tamir Rice.

The names roll off her tongue. She knows them well.

In February 2012, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, shot Trayvon Martin. He was 17. His killer ignored orders from the 911 operator to not pursue, but claimed self-defense when he shot him. He was eventually charged and found not guilty. The prolonged media coverage of public outrage and the acquittal was part of the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement.

In November 2014, two Cleveland officers responded to a police dispatch about an African-American male pointing a pistol in a park. They were not told that the original caller also said it was probably a toy and the wielder probably a child. Within two seconds of arriving on the scene, the younger officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The officer had previously been deemed unfit for duty by a police department in a Cleveland suburb. Under a legal settlement, Cleveland paid $6 million to the Rice family. The officer was not charged.

Limontas-Salisbury says black moms juggle all the daily worries of all mothers. Added to their pile is something greater though; the fear of police attention and violence.

Tara Payne agrees.

“You never really stop worrying about them,” says Payne, a senior designer of children’s clothes. She and her husband have two young girls: Perri, 6; and Priya, 4. The family lives in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, a transient area of rising rents and rapid development.

A typical day at work for Payne is spent running around her office building on Madison Avenue, a famously high-end address in Manhattan. She’s in meetings, having fittings and visiting a library of vintage archives for inspiration.

She started in the industry when she designed her own senior prom dress as a high school student in the Bronx, the lower-income borough to the north where Payne, as a child, enjoyed something not so available to her own family in Long Island City: a close community.

When she and her sister went out to play, she recalls that her mother could trust that the neighbors would have an eye out. Everyone knew and looked out for each other. “Here, you have to arrange play dates,” she says. She can’t just go outside and see her kids playing with friends.

Limontas-Salisbury’s son still goes to the same school in Red Hook, just south of Downtown Brooklyn. Few of his classmates come from his neighborhood. He takes robotics and plays basketball. At school, teachers discuss issues of the day. The curriculum doesn’t shy away from tough topics she says.

In August 2014, they talked about Mike Brown, a young black man killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In that killing, a jury decided not to bring criminal charges against the officer (in other words, they did not indict him).

The daughter of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man choked to death by a New York City police officer, has come in to the school to speak to students.

Her son’s school has plenty of books. Projects are displayed in the hallways and hang from the ceilings, she says. Students are taught to write memoirs and the principal knows her son by name. Vitally, metal detectors are nowhere to be found. “It was important to me because that’s not the experience that I wanted my child to have,” she says. “Metal detectors say, to me, suspicion about the student.”

She says metal detectors don’t ensure safety in schools. “School should be a place where you do feel safe, but what makes it feel safe is the people who are there, not the metal detector or security guards going through your book bag.”

At the same time, whether there is a direct link or not, crime is down significantly in schools since metal detectors were installed in over 200 New York City schools in the 1990s.

#AllBlackLivesMatter

“Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” co-founder Alicia Garza wrote for the #BlackLivesMatter website. “It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”

Movement leaders embrace all issues of marginalization, including mass incarceration.

Protests over the mistreatment of young men are often the loudest, but the movement was founded by three black women and addresses intersectional violence at every turn; how poverty exposes people to more policing, how anti-drug policies have disproportionately targeted minorities, how the brutal legacy of slavery plays out in the ongoing effects of racial segregation and discrimination.

Limontas-Salisbury is careful to debunk the misconception that Black Lives Matter is just about boys. Excluding black women from the narrative of police brutality erases the very visceral relationship black women have with the issue. “It’s not just young men, it feels like young black people are under assault in this country,” she says.

Last summer, her 23-year-old daughter went on a road trip with friends to South Carolina. It was right after the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail cell.

Footage of Breaion King’s arrest in Austin surfaced this summer. Police pulled her over for speeding and slammed her body into the ground. She was 26 and a schoolteacher. Salisbury says these are the images running through her mind.

Before she let her daughter leave, Salisbury photographed the car’s license plate, she gave her number to everyone in the car and requested they let her know any time they decided to stop. They drove through the night to the South and Salisbury said she didn’t sleep well.

The police in the United States kill at disproportionally higher rates than law enforcers in comparable countries. And when police officers shoot and kill, black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than white Americans to be the victims.

For Black Lives Matter activists, a big issue is the failure to indict police officers, which creates the sense they can break the law with impunity.

For those killed, each mother will mourn and her cries will be unheard, because the police officer will not be charged with a crime, or indicted. The greatest reprimand will be 30 days of desk duty. In New York alone, police have killed 19 people so far in 2016.

This summer, Black Lives Matter protesters have frequently occupied the park outside of City Hall to protest those killings and others around the country.

Both Limontas Salisbury and Payne feel allied to the movement.

“If we don’t have movements like Black Lives Matter and rhetoric like Donald Trump’s continues to go on, I don’t know what the future is going to hold for my kids,” Payne says.

Salisbury feels the weight of the psychological impact on the community every time a police shoots an unarmed black person. “That’s what people don’t see. If every life mattered, we wouldn’t be feeling that we’re particularly targeted.”

In Bed-Stuy, she says, plainclothes cops are her biggest concern. The first time she saw them stop a couple of men in her neighborhood, she thought they were friends running into each other. “I can imagine that the first time that happens to a young man, they don’t know what’s going on either,” she says.

A few years ago, she was going home on the train alone. She crossed over into the next car to avoid a group of rowdy men. One followed her and began to question her about where she was going and asked her to step off the train. She didn’t immediately realize he was with the New York Police Department. “When it’s plainclothes, how do you know what to do? Is it a person coming up to rob you? Because they don’t always identify themselves.”

She adds that because of her son, their whole life is going to be framed around that. “I have a friend who is a grown man in his 50s and still gets stopped by the police. It’s opened my eyes in the last few years, especially living in New York, that I shouldn’t be surprised that may happen from time to time.”

‘Not the Way I Want to Live’

She tries not to be over-occupied with thoughts of police malpractice. “I am not the spokesperson for all black people, I’m just one mother,” Salisbury says. “But that’s not the way I want to live and I don’t want him to live that way.”

Last year, a classmate of Payne’s daughter Perri told the little girl that police only arrest brown people. “I had to figure out a way to have that conversation with a 5-year-old. I don’t want her to feel like that is the case,” Payne says.

Back in Manhattan, I’m sitting with Payne in a coffee shop off Madison Avenue. She’s effortlessly chic in perfectly worn jeans and statement jewelry pieces. Her purse looks like a take-out box. It’s the definition of delightful. She flips through Facebook on her phone, showing me pictures of her daughters. In each, the girls are clad in colorful clothes, laughing with each other and their cousins.

“I don’t want them to think that they’re not beautiful,” she says. “All those princess shows and they want the dolls, so I’m always looking for that black character, who just isn’t there.”
She teaches her girls the values of self-worth and integrity. This summer, she took them to summer camp in Flushing, a major melting pot section of northeastern Queens.

It’s a long commute, but the camp is worth it. Campers and counselors are a highly diverse group, Payne says. “We want to give them that diversity,: so they don’t feel like, ‘Why am I the only one that’s brown? Why is my hair this way?’ I’m starting to get the questions from my just-turned-6-year-old.”

Maintaining the value of diversity allows her girls to know people from a variety of cultures so that they might never question their common ground with people who look different from themselves.

Donald Trump’s GOP nomination for the presidency has reinforced this as a major concern for Payne. “If they hear someone say something bad about another ethnicity, they can say, ‘oh that’s not true.’ I want them to be able to have their eyes open to what the world has to offer.”

Payne said teachers and counselors consistently say that her girls are well-behaved and sweet. Those moments make her incredibly proud. I asked her what makes her happiest. She said when she picks them up at the end of the day and they run to her with hugs, kisses and exclamations of how much they missed her. “It lets me know that I must be doing something right. Even though I may burn the food sometimes or make them wear their sneakers out.”

She laughs when she talks about her children.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing something right,” she said. “But just to have them tell me how much they love me and they tell me I’m the best mom ever, tells me that I’m doing okay. Just okay.”

In the office, I’m on the phone with Limontas-Salisbury. She reiterates the all-encompassing love that comes with motherhood. She talked to her son recently about changes the family is going through. Above all, she wants him to be happy. “I told him, ‘you are my heart and soul. I don’t care what else goes on. Your comfort and your security and your wellbeing are more important than anything else to me. Anything else.’”

Both women remind me of my own mother.

My mom and I have 70 email threads back and forth. Clicking through them, I find one she signed, “I love you more than the air in my lungs.”

She’s always sending me notes like that, attached to daily updates about the practicalities of life. Black moms can be protective to a fault because they bear the burden of history when they watch their children cross the road into the unknown. But their history also brings joy. In that joy, they find the freedom to live unapologetically. That’s what makes them so special.

]]>https://womensenews.org/2016/09/in-nyc-two-moms-describe-the-intimacy-of-blacklivesmatter/feed/1In Liberia, Girls and Women Face a Future Without U.N. Peacekeepershttps://womensenews.org/2016/09/in-liberia-girls-and-women-face-a-future-without-u-n-peacekeepers/
Wed, 07 Sep 2016 08:00:54 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=788318(WOMENSENEWS)— Lorpu Faith Scott, a senior education officer in Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia, is worried that girls might start missing out on school when the roads get bad.

In the past, U.N. troops helped move cars on the road during the rainy season. But now, as the new school year approaches, she wonders how some girls will reach their classes in bad weather if troops are not around. As part of the U.N. Mission in Liberia, or UNMIL, troops helped people traverse patches of the road that were otherwise unnavigable.

And she worries about the safety of girls who walk to school. “Security issues will be very hard—especially for the girls,” says Scott, who works for the education nonprofit IBIS Liberia and spoke recently by Skype. “Some of the girls that go to school in the rural areas walk for like 30 minutes to get to where the school is. If they get violated on the road, there’s no security for them when UNMIL is not around.”

The United Nations peacekeeping operation that set up in Liberia in 2003, after the end of the country’s long civil war, started out as the second-largest mission in the world with 15,000 military people and 1,115 police officers.

For more than a decade, U.N. personnel have supported the country’s national police, its justice and corrections operations and some aspects of its central bureaucracy.

On June 30, the United Nations Mission in Liberia returned security control to the national government during an ongoing drawdown that began in 2015. Now the military mission is down to 1,240; the police mission is 606.

The ultimate fate of the mission — how much longer it will be in the country to help out in dire circumstances–will be decided by the U.N. Security Council by Dec. 15.

Some other U.N. properties, such as UN Women and UNICEF, will remain in the country after UNMIL has completely phased out.

Those who supported the security transfer claimed that the country is stable enough to police itself, but concerned citizens believe otherwise.

Certainly, women in the country have established a strong political heritage and foundation for further progress. For the past decade, the country has been led by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel peace laureate and the first female president of an African country, who will be leaving office in 2017. While her tenure was marred by allegations of corruption, she has also been credited with stabilizing both the country and its economy.

The country also boasts of Leymah Gbowee, another Nobel peace prize winner who led an interfaith movement of women, also known as the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, using dialogue and civil disobedience to help bring an end to the civil war.

That legacy of peacebuilding has continued to be effective today through institutions such as the Peace Huts, a project of the same movement that is now supported by the U.N.’s Liberian mission and UN Women.

In these Peace Huts, women are given a space to resolve their complaints before they build into violence. The practice has proven so effective that the huts have become celebrated for preventing violence and reducing cases brought to local police stations.

Female-Led Solutions

Sarah Douglas, the gender adviser of the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, says Liberian girls and young women have unique powers in addressing security conflicts in ways that aren’t accessible to forces like UNMIL or the Liberian government.

Douglas, who recently spoke by Skype, says female-led solutions are a critical part of the response to these security threats. “They’re based on the underlying assumption that women and girls know what the solutions to their own problems are.”

The country, however, is taking steps sideways and backward — as well as forward –when it comes to investing in the well-being of girls and women.

In March, the Ministry of Education passed a new code of conduct for teachers that would hold teachers liable for criminal prosecution for impregnating students. That was a positive sign, but the country’s rape law, which criminalizes statutory rape, lacks the resources to be enforced.

Meanwhile, parliament struck a serious blow to those working against gender-based violence in April, when it removed a ban on female genital mutilation, or FGM, from a new domestic violence law.

The change—made over widespread opposition, including that of Julia Duncan Cassell, the country’s minister of gender, children and social protection– came in response to pressure from the Sande, a Liberian secret society that centers on initiating girls into womanhood.

Thousands of girls are annually taken away from their homes and schools to attend Sande encampments, also known as “bush schools,” that prepare them for marriage through genital cutting and training in social etiquette and domestic skills. It is seen as dangerous and forbidden to discuss secret societies like the Sande with those who haven’t been initiated, hence their mysteriousness and infamy in and outside the country.

Half of Liberia’s female population between the ages of 15 and 49 has undergone FGM, and it’s commonly practiced on girls between the ages of 3 and 11.

Sheldon Yett, the outgoing UNICEF country representative for Liberia, says that laws and policies like the rape and domestic violence laws are important, but they don’t have as much of an impact as Liberia’s cultural norms. Yett, who spoke recently by phone, suggests that giving women and girls the space and resources for empowerment is crucial in disrupting the prevalence of gender-based violence in Liberian society.

“There are government policies and laws but those are rather secondary to the things that matter, or to the overall society and culture,” Yett says. “[Through] social norms, women and girls are often seen as second-class citizens. Many practices are meant to keep girls in their place and until they have that impact for change, it’s very hard to move forward.”

Cassell, the gender minister, says the deletion of the ban on FGM in the law against domestic violence is her biggest frustration. But Cassell, who spoke with Women’s eNews over the phone, says it is too soon to make any projections on how the country will handle girls’ safety and gender-based violence in the long run after the U.N. mission leaves.

“Liberians should give themselves credit,” Cassell says. “Somewhere you have to draw the line. UNMIL was here for the last 15 years, almost. So when do you say that it’s OK for UNMIL to leave?”

Special U.N. Policing Units

To meet its mandate to prevent human rights abuses and pay special attention to women and children, the U.N. established policing units to handle gender-based violence and juvenile justice.

The U.N. mission has also been supporting locals in maintaining a safe house for survivors of sexual violence in Lofa County that was originally built for the Ebola crisis. In other efforts, UNMIL has been recruiting and managing talent for the government to ensure that at least 20 percent of the national security staff is women.

Liberia’s Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and UN Women’s country team on the ground are also entering their third phase of a program that brings together all relevant government and U.N. entities to publicize the problem of sexual and gender-based violence and create strategies to redress it.

Some of this delay affects what will happen to girls and women after the U.N. mission leaves. Specialized courts for sexual and gender-based violence cases, for instance, are only stationed in eight of Liberia’s 15 counties, hindering prosecutions in the other places.

Just three days before UNMIL made its security transfer, the Unites States, on June 27, pledged $27 million in Let Girls Learn programming to conduct research and increase enrollment, safety and work-readiness for schoolgirls in Liberia.

Yet keeping girls in school has its own risks. A 2014 study found that 18 percent of girls and 13 percent of boys reported being subjected to “sex4grades,” an instance in which a teacher or school administrator will ask schoolchildren for sex to improve their scores. The study also found that 29 percent of girls and 35 percent of boys had reported sexual abuse from teachers, school staff and fellow classmates.

Amid such grim realities, there’s a palpable fear of the unknown now among many Liberians. After decades of government corruption and the atrocities that occurred during Liberia’s wars, civilians have come to trust foreign security forces more than their own, several people interviewed for this article say.

‘There is Still Rape’

Mae Azango, a Liberian journalist with FrontPage Africa and New Narratives, doesn’t think the U.N. mission has helped reduce sexual and gender-based violence.

“Men will always be men,” says Azango, who spoke recently by phone. “They were part of the terrible people who were violating our girls. Whether UNMIL is here or is absent, it makes no difference because we have the first female president, we have female ministers and yet still there is rape on the increase.”

Azango does acknowledge, however, that UNMIL’s work has brought peace to her country for over a decade. And despite the reassurances from government officials, including Sirleaf, Azango stresses that the Liberian people are at risk as long as they are left in the hands of a national police force that she says is understaffed and distracted with chronic nonpayment.

While there is a modernization push in some parts of the country, Liberia is still a poor country. More than 60 percent of the country lives below the poverty line, according to the World Food Programme, a humanitarian group based in Rome.

Scott, the senior education officer, chokes up briefly as she recalls what this can mean to a girl’s chances at education and life.

She tells the story of a student she met while teaching in Bomi County, northwest of the capital of Monrovia. Due to her smarts and commanding presence, Scott nicknamed her “Ellen” after President Johnson.

As a fifth grader, “Ellen” was at the top of her class. But by sixth grade she was struggling to keep up with her studies. By eighth grade she could hardly stay awake in school. When Scott confronted her, the girl confessed that her parents were pressuring her into sex with a local pastor. The girl’s family was poor, so her parents condoned the man’s advances so that he would cover the girl’s school fees. Traumatized, the girl spent her nights running around her neighborhood as the pastor chased her. The former star student eventually wound up pregnant and dropped out of school.

“When I talk about her I cry,” Scott says. “I knew how smart she was.”

Widespread Rape, Domestic Violence

In addition to hurting girls’ chances at schooling and safety, poverty also restricts what they can expect from the justice system, particularly in remote areas, when they suffer gender-based violence.

Rape is the country’s most frequently reported crime, the Overseas Development Institute found in a 2014 report, accounting for more than one-third of sexual violence cases. The U.K.-based think tank says adolescent girls are the primary targets and almost 40 percent of perpetrators are adult men known to victims.

Poverty, the lasting trauma of sexual violence and the burden of premature, unwanted pregnancies are all reasons numerous analysts say help explain why Liberian girls have a secondary school completion rate of merely 9 percent; half that of the opposite sex.

James Mugo Muriithi, an officer in the gender advisory unit of the U.N.’s Liberian mission, says his team is most preoccupied with strengthening the county offices of Liberia’s gender ministry during the transition.

The team is working to decentralize the services of the U.N. mission to ensure all of Liberia (as opposed to just its capital of Monrovia) is being accounted for. This has meant handing off the work of UNMIL field offices in gathering data relevant to gender-responsiveness to the U.N.’s affiliated country teams in divisions like UNICEF and UN Women.

The U.N. is working as hard as possible to ensure that Liberia’s justice system can carry on human rights-based approaches to handling sexual and gender-based violence cases, Muriithi says.

He credits the mission’s work alongside local women in its peacebuilding and advocacy efforts as one of the operation’s biggest gains in gender responsiveness.

“I think there could be several challenges like any other country that is coming from conflict that require structure, and long-term and medium-term measures,” Muriithi says. “Some of those issues are pertinent. Some are fears. But the question is: how do the government, the people of Liberia and other partners support them to move from some of these challenges?”

Nonetheless, Kula V. Fofana does worry about what will happen to prosecution of gender-based crimes without UNMIL’s neutral and authoritative monitoring of local police stations. Fofana, the 27-year-old assistant minister of youth development at the Ministry of Youth and Sports, based in Monrovia, spoke with Women’s eNews recently by Skype. She says local police officers often blame female victims for their sexual and domestic abuse, which makes officers feel entitled to throw out cases.

“Sometimes when you try to take a case to the police station, the police try to compromise it because the police officers live in the community,” Fofana says. “So if a girl or a woman carries a complaint, sometimes you see the police taking sides.”

]]>Women Running for Senate Pour Millions into Their Campaignshttps://womensenews.org/2016/08/women-running-for-senate-pour-millions-into-their-campaigns/
Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:00:06 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=777447(WOMENSENEWS) –A woman’s place may be in the U. S. Senate, but millions of dollars are required to get them there.

Just look at what is going on in California. The country’s 10th-most expensive Senate race includes two female Democrats who won the most votes in the state’s “jungle system” of open primaries, where the top two vote getters compete in the general election regardless of political affiliation.

Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who together raised a total of more than $17 million, are competing for the seat of Democrat Barbara Boxer, who is retiring.

The 2016 Senate races—which feature 17 women in all running for one of the two major parties–are expected to break spending records as the Democrats strive to gain four seats to take control. The Republicans are defending 24 seats, the Democrats 10.

Currently, there are 14 female Democrats and six female Republicans in the Senate, just 20 percent of the total 100 seats. Only 46 women have ever served in the Senate, including 29 Democrats and 17 Republicans, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick.

Incumbents, as usual, are enjoying a big financial advantage this election year. They had raised an average of $10,093,653, compared to $1,024,983, for challengers as of Aug. 16, the Center for Responsive Politics reported.

But this year, challengers are more likely to be elected, notes Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics. “There is tremendous dissatisfaction with the status quo,” she said in a phone interview. “Voters are angry at Congress and eager for change.”

In Pennsylvania, the most expensive race, more than $35 million has been raised by the two candidates; incumbent Republican Pat Toomey and Democratic challenger Katie McGinty. A former state and federal environmental policy official, McGinty led Toomey 38 to 30 percent among registered voters, according to a poll released by Franklin and Marshall College on Aug. 3.

Highest Profile Bid

The highest profile bid to unseat an incumbent stars Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat, who is hoping to deny Republican John McCain a sixth term. Their Arizona race is currently the ninth-most costly of the 34 Senate contests, notes the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, which uses the quarterly reports of the Federal Election Commission, or FEC, to track campaign spending.

As of June 30, Kirkpatrick had $2.4 million in cash, found the Center for Responsive Politics. With 61 days to go before the GOP primary on Aug. 30, McCain had $5.2 million.

Support by women’s groups will be crucial, as Emily’s LIST noted when it announced it would provide financial support for Kirkpatrick and eight other female Senate candidates in 2016.

“McCain will have the help of the same extremist donors who bankrolled his 2008 campaign against Barack Obama,” noted the Washington-based organization, which raised $26.8 million in the first half of 2016, its largest haul since it began supporting pro–choice female Democrats in 1985. “The GOP will be dead set on holding on to this seat– and they will stop at nothing to win. Ann has run tough campaigns in the past– and she knows what she’s up against this year.”

As of June 30, the center reported, McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, had raised $11.7 million, $7 million more than Kirkpatrick, who is completing her third term in the House.

Incumbency makes it difficult for candidates–men as well as women–to successfully challenge sitting senators, notes Kim Fridkin, a professor of political science at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

“Incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time because they are better known, can gather media attention and can raise money more easily than challengers,” she said in an email interview.

A large war chest is a major asset because it discourages challengers from running and donors from contributing to opponents, said Fridkin, co-author of “No-Holds Barred Negative Campaigning in U.S. Senate Campaigns,” published in 2004.

“Women have a harder time getting their message out,” Fridkin explained,” because female candidates still receive less favorable news coverage than men. Even controlling for partisanship and experience, it is often more difficult for women to control their message, because there is a bigger disconnect between what women candidates are saying in their messages and what the media are reporting.”

Neck and Neck

Because Arizona voters tended to be conservatives who favor Republicans, McCain has never faced a serious challenge during his 35 years in Washington, said Earl de Berge, research director of the Phoenix-based Research Center, an independent, nonpartisan organization that produces the Rocky Mountain poll, in a phone interview.

This year, however, McCain and Kirkpatrick, a former prosecutor who grew up on a Native American reservation, are neck and neck in the polls.

Individuals and PACS devoted to women’s issues have been Kirkpatrick’s most generous supporters since 2008, when she won a four-person Democratic primary by 19 points and was elected to the House from Arizona’s largest congressional district. They have contributed nearly 1 million of the more than $14 million raised.

EMILY’s LIST, which raised $432,529 for Kirkpatrick’s four previous campaigns, was her top supporter in the first half of the current campaign with $38,450.

Sixty-six year old Kirkpatrick also collected $10,000 from the Los Angeles-based Women’s Political Committee, which has been raising funds for female candidates across the country since 1979.

McCain has been a fundraising powerhouse, raising more than $488 million.

In this race, he has raised more in the current campaign from individuals ($7,481,508) than Kirkpatrick ($3,941,924) and received larger sums, according to an Aug. 16 report by the Center for Responsive Politics. Only 5 percent of McCain’s contributions were less than $200 compared to 30 percent of Kirkpatrick’s.

In recent years, most of McCain’s war chest has been spent defeating arch conservatives in GOP primaries rather than in general elections against under-funded Democrats.

In the Aug. 30, 2016, GOP primary in Arizona, McCain has spent $5.9 million battling former State Sen. Kelli Ward, as of June 30.

Ward, who has strong Tea Party support, told Salon Aug. 4 that she “didn’t want a political career” but had entered the race because 80-year-old McCain is “the incumbent of incumbents.”

“I’ve got a great life as a wife, and a mom and a family doctor, a person who gets to serve the people,” said 47-year-old Ward, who had spent $981.848. “But I’m running to empower the Border Patrol to keep people from coming into the country illegally, not to welcome them with a basketful of goodies and a bus ticket from Phoenix to points unknown across the U.S.”

Campaign costs escalated this summer, thanks to the warring ads of McCain and Ward. Arizona is not a large state but Phoenix is the 12th largest media market in the country so ads are costly, said Fridkin, at Arizona State University.

After avoiding a primary in 2004, McCain spent over $4.6 million to defeat Democrat Stuart Starky, an eighth grade social studies teacher who had raised a mere $12,716.

To win his fifth term in 2010, McCain invested $21 million—10 times the amount raised by his opponent J. D. Hayworth–to win the GOP primary with 56 percent of the vote.

Ad Wars

McCain’s ads denounced Ward as “Chemtrail Kelli” because in 2014, she organized a town hall meeting to explore the conspiracy theory that airplanes were spraying dangerous chemicals through contrails, the thin trails left behind the planes, posing a threat to Arizona’s weather.

Ward, who had tried to repeal Arizona’s law against sawed-off shotguns, has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America and other groups that have attacked McCain for being soft on the Second Amendment.

“Avoiding a primary, as Kirkpatrick did this year, enables challengers to concentrate on getting their message out and obtaining the financial support they need in the general election to run expensive ads and mobilize voters,” said Walsh, of the Center for American Women and Politics.

Walsh added that financial support by the national parties is critical for the success of Senate challengers who may not be well-known outside their states. “It says to potential contributors, ‘here is a candidate that has done well in previous races and who can play an important role in the Senate,’” said Walsh.

About 79 percent of McCain’s contributions and 39 percent of Kirkpatrick’s came from outside the state, which in 2014 had a population of only 6.7 million and a median income of $50,068, $3,589 lower than the U.S. median.

Like most Republicans in Congress, McCain has received more campaign contributions from business than Democratic rivals. McCain has earned $1,147,381, dwarfing Kirkpatrick’s $106,500.

Kirkpatrick also received $10,000 each from the leadership PACS of some fellow Democrats: A Level Playing Field, founded by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren; AmeriPAC: the Fund for a Greater America, founded by Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland who is the Democratic whip in the House; and the New Democrat Coalition, a Centrist Democratic group chaired by Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin.

Unions, which have been backing Democrats since the 1930s, are also expected be a major source of funds for Kirkpatrick this fall. As of June 30, she had raised $221,000 from unions, ranging from the Transport Workers to United Food and Commercial Workers to the American Federation of Government Employees. McCain had received only $7,000.

McCain, meanwhile, is expected to rake in money from military contractors and groups with an eye on military aid.

As a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is responsible for border security, counterterrorism and cyber security, McCain can help Arizona’s burgeoning aerospace industry. A 2012 DeLoitte study found that Arizona ranked fourth nationally in aerospace industry payroll and fourth in aerospace revenue at $14.99 billion.

As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain is expected to attract contributions from corporations, individuals and advocacy groups this fall that have a strong interest in President Obama’s proposal to spend $585 billion on national security and defense in fiscal year 2015, especially in the volatile Middle East.

NorPac, which backs candidates and members of Congress who support Israel, was McCain’s leading supporter in the period ending June 30, the Center for Responsive Politics found. McCain received $76,793 of the $941,113 NorPac had raised. In the past, NorPac has lobbied for stronger Iran sanctions and additional funds for Iron Dome and other anti-missile systems for Israel.

]]>Is the U.S. Ready to Start Caring About the Crisis in Caretaking?https://womensenews.org/2016/08/is-the-u-s-ready-to-start-caring-about-the-crisis-in-caretaking/
Wed, 24 Aug 2016 08:00:21 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=762686(WOMENSENEWS)—Kristy Umfleet knows both sides of the child care crisis.

With a bachelor’s degree in hand, Umfleet has kept her pre-K teaching job for the past decade at a child care education program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is dedicated to teaching children aged 3 to 5.

Pre-K teachers, she believes, are teaching children skills and values they will sustain throughout their lives. She loves her work because there is more time for free-flowing conversations and interactions than in later years, when teachers face heavier workloads and time constraints.

But passion, she says, “doesn’t pay the bills.”

Umfleet and her husband have two small children and the costs of supporting the family, struggling with accumulated debt and maintaining reliable cars all mean they live paycheck to paycheck. They cannot afford child care so that responsibility falls heavily on Umfleet’s mother.

Umfleet has thought about moving on to elementary school or higher education for higher pay, but so far she has backed out of applying every time. “I know I won’t be happy.”

What if the resolution to this much-talked about child care crisis lies with a low-profile group of thinkers called “care economists?”

Care economists are trying to change the way we think about the provision of caring services for everyone; children, elderly, people with disabilities and people with medical problems. Instead of thinking of these services as a drain, exponents see them as the keys to the economic engine. Invest in human capacity first and economic strength will follow, goes the premise.

A national budget built on the principles of a caring economy would prioritize such things as early care for children, fair pay and increased benefits for workers, high quality and affordable education, sustainable natural resources and a green environment, along with job creation in the business and private sectors.

In a policy proposal to invest in a caring economy, Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign proposes tax relief for families to care for ailing members, implement training programs for care workers, expanding workers’ benefits and allocating more funding for a program that helps caretakers take breaks from work. The campaign also touches upon the often neglected domain of unpaid care, mentioning an estimate of its worth at $470 billion in 2013.

Search Outside the U.S.

These ideas are not new. For a couple decades now care advocates have been searching for models outside the U.S., in Norway, Sweden and France.

In 1989, Clinton joined a delegation on a trip to France to examine the French child care system while she was a lawyer and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund. Following the visit, she wrote a New York Times op-ed article calling for a number of specifics, including better pay for early child care providers such as Umfleet.

“To do our children and our country justice, we need to develop a nationwide consensus on how to best nurture our children, and, through that nurturing, prevent the personal and social costs we all pay when children’s needs are not met,” Clinton wrote years ago.

Some of the social costs of not meeting the care needs of children—or anyone—are paid by those who provide care to family members without any remuneration. For women, the unmet care needs of family members can often mean exiting paid employment, losing income and winding up, as older people, with lower Social Security income.

While much has been written about the problems of caretakers, the national consensus that Clinton called for decades ago has been slow to develop.

For the most part the different principles of caring economists are proceeding piecemeal and on a partisan basis, typically backed by Democrats. Usually the push for the government to take more responsibility for caretaking meets critics on the right rejecting the notion of a “nanny state.”

One sign of broadening support, however, came on Aug. 15, when the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, introduced a concrete proposal for paid parental leave.

A prominent proponent of caring economics is Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born educator, author and speaker who is also the president of the Center for Partnership Studies, based in Pacific Groove, California. Under Eisler’s direction, the center is steadily promoting the ideas of caring economics through awareness efforts.

In 2014 the Center for Partnership Studies also worked with advocates from a number of schools and universities to launch the Social Wealth Economic Indicators, or SWEIs, to show how investment in care programs can build long-term social stability.

According to the launch report, SWEIs aim to show policymakers, social activists and professors the economic value of care work and early childhood education, which are considered pivotal to developing high-quality human capital.

Take child care for example. Authors of the indicators highlight a 35-year study of a Michigan preschool program where participants were “15 percent less likely to commit a violent crime, 20 percent more likely to earn a living wage and 16 percent more likely to have a savings account.”

Forging a National Consensus

Tara Cookson, a specialist in care economy based in Seattle, highlights the need to forge a national consensus about links between generous caregiving policies, a thriving society and a strong economy.

Cookson, who spoke recently by phone, says that would require a lot of public outreach. Discussions, she believes, need to be framed in multiple, multicultural ways to reach people of all ages and backgrounds.

For now, however, the ideas of caring economists are moving piecemeal by individual politicians and campaigns. Overall, the holistic idea of reshaping the national budget around the needs of people such as Umfleet is still far from central national discourse.

And while care economists clamor for more national attention, there may simply not be enough of them to raise the volume. For a week, emails to Eisler, asking about her plans to engage with the 2016 elections, went unanswered.

Perhaps the closest voice to it is that of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his call, during his presidential campaign, for a “national revolution.”

Umfleet, meanwhile, says progress in her particular area of the caring economy begins with change in the long-established stereotypes about care.

“Society has this idea around early childhood that it is not education and more like babysitting, and that is not true,” she says.

As a member of the North Carolina Child Care Coalition in Raleigh, a grassroots organization, Umfleet and others are trying to change that. “In Guilford County, beside wages campaign, we’re working to collaborate with the state and raise awareness that we’re educators, we have degrees and this is education,” Umfleet says.

Umfleet recently joined a press call about a national study of the low wages of early education providers.

She hopes more teachers will come together to make their care narratives widely known at the county, state and even national level. These stories, she believes, will help pull the principles of a caring economy ahead.

]]>Pro-Choice Kirkpatrick Threatens to Upset McCain in Arizonahttps://womensenews.org/2016/08/pro-choice-kirkpatrick-threatens-to-upset-mccain-in-arizona/
Mon, 22 Aug 2016 08:00:48 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=762523(WOMENSENEWS)— Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat who represents the least populous congressional district in Arizona, was hardly seen as a threat in May when she announced she would be challenging Sen. John McCain, a five-term Republican senator and the 2008 GOP presidential nominee.

Senate incumbents, after all, usually win reelection. But a combination of demographical changes in the state, a former GOP stronghold, and the impact of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has turned their race into one of the most hotly contested of the 34 Senate campaigns.

If she does win, it would mean a very different Senate face for Arizona on policies affecting women.

As a member of the Arizona State Legislature, Kirkpatrick, a Catholic who has two daughters, voted against a bill that would have required minors to obtain parental consent for abortion. As a member of the House, she voted to reject a law that would have banned abortions 20 or more weeks after fertilization.

Despite his reputation as a political maverick, McCain has consistently adhered to the anti-choice position of the GOP.

As a member of the House from 1983 to 1987, he supported only one of 11 reproductive health measures: a bill to increase federal funding for stem cell research. In the Senate, McCain, the Baptist father of four biological and three adopted children, voted no on 115 of 119 reproductive health bills. He also voted to confirm four anti-choice candidates for the Supreme Court: Justices Sam Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.

The two also disagree on ways to end Arizona’s gender wage gap. In 2014, women earned 84 cents to every $1 by men, reported the Washington-based National Partnership for Women and Families, a nonpartisan organization that promotes workplace fairness.

Sixty-six-year-old Kirkpatrick supports the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was intended to protect women who want to compare their salaries with men in order to determine if there is a pay disparity, while 79-year-old McCain opposes it.

The Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009, which makes it easier for victims of wage discrimination to seek remedies in court, was the first bill Kirkpatrick voted on in the House. She voted in support of it.

After missing the 2008 vote because he was campaigning in New Orleans, McCain claimed that the legislation was unnecessary because it would “open us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.” Instead, McCain said, women simply needed more training and education.

‘Fighting for His Political Life’

“For more than 30 years, McCain has faced little opposition because Arizona voters tended to be conservatives who favored Republicans,” says Earl de Berge, research director of the Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center, an independent, nonpartisan research program that conducts the Rocky Mountain Poll. “But this year, McCain is fighting for his political life.”

In June, the Rocky Mountain poll found that 40 percent of registered voters favored McCain and 31 percent supported Kirkpatrick.

“But the most significant finding was that the proportion of uncommitted voters rose to 29 percent in June, up from 16 percent in April,” says de Berge, who spoke recently by phone. “Usually the ranks of undecided voters decline steadily as the election nears, sometimes to as little as 10 percent.”

Also significant was the growth in the proportion of uncommitted independent voters, 45 percent in June, up from 12 percent in April, and the number of uncommitted Hispanic voters, 29 percent up from 13 percent.

As a result, de Berge says, “the challenge for both candidates will be maintaining the support of their respective bases who voted for Trump and Clinton in the presidential primaries while finding messages that resonate with independents.”

As the two candidates vie for the independent voters, Kirkpatrick’s record on these issues could help. Independent voters are more liberal on social issues than the overall electorate in Arizona, found a November 2015 study by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University in Phoenix. Ninety-nine percent of liberal leaning independents supported a women’s right to abortion. Among moderate-leaning independents, 82 percent did.

In June, the Rocky Mountain Poll showed Kirkpatrick leading McCain 57 to 37 percent among women but trailing McCain 49 to 37 among men.

The outcome of the race may also depend upon who wins the Hispanic vote. An estimated 433,000 Hispanics are expected to cast ballots Nov. 8, an 8 percent increase from 2012, reports the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Los Angeles.

Kirkpatrick’s up-by-the bootstraps background may resonate with registered Hispanic voters, half of whom are women. She grew up in Whiteriver, a small town on the Apache reservation in Eastern Arizona, though neither of her parents were Native American. There, her dad, a Democrat, ran the general store and her mother, a Republican, taught school. She worked as a waitress while studying for a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies at the University of Arizona at Tucson. After a brief stint as a teacher, she became a lawyer.

As the first deputy county attorney in Coconino County, Kirkpatrick prosecuted homicides, aggravated assaults and other grisly crimes. She also improved the handling of domestic violence cases by convincing the county to provide more services for victims.

Trump’s Influence

The presence of Trump at the top of the GOP ticket increases the likelihood that Hispanic Republicans and independents will join the 43 percent of Latino registered voters who are Democrats in supporting Kirkpatrick.

Trump has called for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and for a wall to be built at the Mexican border, which has angered Hispanic registered voters, 82 percent of whom are natural born citizens and 17 percent naturalized.

To retain Hispanic support, McCain is counting on his endorsement by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and his co-sponsorship of a comprehensive immigration plan that would have provided a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented workers in 2013.

The votes of veterans, especially Hispanics, are crucial for both McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Kirkpatrick, a member of the House Veterans Committee. In 2011, there were over 500,000 veterans in Arizona, 10.8 percent of the population over 18, making Arizona, one of 15 states with the highest concentration of veterans, found a Pew Research study.

Just as Arizona has a higher percentage of the population that is Hispanic than the U.S., it also has a higher percentage of veterans who are Hispanic, 10.8 percent compared to 5.6 nationally.

McCain has made providing health care and other benefits for veterans and their families the centerpiece of his legislative career. In April, he co-sponsored the Care Veterans Deserve Bill, which would have provided access to veterans at private health facilities if they lived more than 40 miles from a VA facility or had to wait more than a month for an appointment. In 2009, Kirkpatrick co-sponsored the Veterans’ Comprehensive Cost of Living Act, which adjusted the rate of compensation for veterans with service-connected disabilities and for survivors of certain disabled veterans.

Since March, when Trump won 47 percent of the Republican vote in the presidential primary, McCain has walked a tightrope endorsing Trump’s candidacy, because he said it was the will of the voters, while chastising Trump for denouncing the parents of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, a Muslin American who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

“In recent days, Donald Trump has disparaged a fallen soldier’s parents,” said McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnam prison after his Navy plane was shot down. “He has suggested that the likes of their son should not be allowed in the U.S.—to say nothing of entering its services. I cannot emphasize how deeply I disagree with Mr. Trump’s statement. I hope Americans understand that the remarks do not represent the views of our Republican party, its officers or candidates.”

Trump–who had received four student deferments from 1964 to 1968 and one after graduation for bone spurs on his feet–responded Aug. 2 by refusing to endorse McCain because he claimed that McCain had not done enough for veterans. However, under pressure from advisors and GOP National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, Trump endorsed McCain three days later.

The GOP endorsements are expected to continue to be a factor in the race this fall. Max Croes, Kirkpatrick’s campaign manager, told the Associated Press Aug. 5 that the time for McCain to “take a principled stand and abandon Trump has closed. No matter what Trump has said or done from shameful personal attacks to racist outbursts, John McCain has blindly pledged to support the nominee,” Croes said.

]]>France Mulls Process for Changing Gender Identificationhttps://womensenews.org/2016/08/france-mulls-process-for-changing-gender-identification/
Mon, 08 Aug 2016 08:00:30 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=704153PARIS (WOMENSENEWS)—France has legislation heading to its Senate this fall that is designed to help between 10,000 to 15,000 transgender people in the country who are living at odds with their official gender identity.

“Going to the post office, looking for a job or a house is a source of discrimination for trans people due to the difference between the real person and their identity card,” Dorothy Delaunay, of the sexual orientation and gender identity section at Amnesty International, told Women’s eNews in a phone interview.

In mid-July, the French National Assembly approved legislation that would allow transgender people to obtain legal gender identification from the courts, rather than by any medical form of proof.

The proposal is seen by many as a liberalization of the country’s current current law.

Under the proposed legislation, applicants may obtain new proof of their gender identity by appearing before a judge and presenting various types of evidence, including physical appearance, change of name and testimonies from family and friends.

But Dominique Ganaye, vice chair of health and prevention services at the LGBT Union, based in the Western French city of Angers, says the proposal is still too limiting. He said the legislation falls short of the Council of Europe’s recommendation of a “quick, transparent and accessible procedure” for changing gender identification.

“The process is not based on self-determination but will continue to depend on the decision of a judge, as in the current practiced case law,” Ganaye said in a phone interview. “The preferred alternative would be a procedure based on self-determination that no longer depends on court proceedings.”

In Europe, transgender people are twice as likely as gay people to be attacked, threatened or insulted, according to a European Union report published in December 2014.

In a 2014 survey, more than half of all the trans respondents (54 percent), compared with 47 percent of all LGBT respondents, felt personally discriminated against or harassed because they were perceived as transgender. The survey was done by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, an advisory group.

Marie Colette Newman, a 50-year-old transgender woman from northern Paris, told Women’s eNews she faces discrimination every day. “I face insults and constant taunts,” she said in an interview last month during the gay pride parade here. “I want trans people to live quietly. I want people to leave us alone.”

In 1992, the European Court of Human Rights recognized that a state’s refusal to allow transgender people to change their gender markers on their official documents was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

]]>Work-Family Advocates Size Up Their Chances in Novemberhttps://womensenews.org/2016/08/work-family-advocates-size-up-their-chances-in-november/
Thu, 04 Aug 2016 08:00:50 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=699674(WOMENSENEWS)—After years of plowing along at the state and city level, the intertwined causes of affordable child care and guaranteed medical leave for workers and their families suddenly drew national attention at both parties’ nominating conventions recently.

“This issue is a priority for voters, who are lifting up their voices at the Democratic National Convention and around the country to demand a solution from elected officials and candidates running for office,” Vivien Labaton, co-founder and co-executive director of the national campaign Make It Work Action, said in a press statement in late July as Democrats were meeting in Philadelphia.

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, the daughter of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, represented her father as a potential champion. In her July 21 speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, she declared that her father is “color-blind and gender-neutral.” As a mother of three, she hailed research noting “gender is no longer the factor creating the greatest wage discrepancies in this country, motherhood is.”

At Trump Organization, the international conglomerate based in New York City, women not only hold more leadership roles than men but also receive equal pay, Ivanka Trump told the crowd at the convention and prime-time television audience of millions. “When a woman becomes a mother, she is supported, not shut out.”

So far, Trump has not offered any policy proposal. However, in an interview with Make It Work in Iowa last fall, when asked about his views on affordable child care Trump simply said, “I love children,” then cut it short by saying, “It’s a big subject, darling.”

Issues such as child care and family leave are not mentioned in the GOP platform.

The campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presidential contender, meanwhile has been promoting a public image of the candidate as a proud daughter, mother and grandmother, someone who devotes her career to improving lives of families and children.

Modernizing Laws

Such initiatives promise to modernize laws that critics say belong to a bygone era, when more households relied on a male breadwinner and a woman at home, available to take care of children and other family members when they got sick.

“The reality is we need to enable our workforce to deal with their family responsibilities by providing these basic benefits,” Rhode Island State Sen. Gayle Goldin, who helped pass her state’s paid family leave law in 2013, recently told Women’s eNews.

Goldin also serves as campaign advisor for Family Values @ Work, a national network of state and local coalitions based in Milwaukee that promotes such work-family-balance policies as paid leave and paid sick days.

While often presented as a bundle of issues, paid leave, sick leave and child care all make their way as separate legislative initiatives.

The bill provides 12 weeks of paid leave equivalent to 66 percent of employee’s monthly wages, with a $1,000 weekly cap, in the event of childbirth, an immediate family member’s serious illness or workers’ own medical needs. It is meant to bolster a law passed in 1993, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which only allows an unpaid leave for the same duration.

Rhode Island’s Goldin says passage of a federal paid family leave law will depend on who is elected to the U.S. Senate and House this fall, and if they are willing to recognize the overwhelming support from constituents, regardless of political party.

Goldin says Family Values @ Work supports 24 coalitions across the country working on paid family leave and paid sick days.

These activists, according to Goldin, are speaking up in candidate forums and questionnaires, making calls, writing letters and talking to people door to door. The goal is to elect more state and U.S. officials who will push ahead the interlocking causes of paid sick leave and affordable child care.

Broad Support

Some research finds broad support, nationally, for paid leave. In February, the National Partnerships for Women & Families released a poll showing that 94 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Independents and 61 percent of Republicans favor updated paid leave laws. Of the poll’s 1,004 participants, 57 percent said it’s “very important” to revamp the law.

On Wednesday, the Washington-based nonprofit just released a new report that evaluates 50 states’ performance in advancing paid leave and other related family laws, just two days before the 23rd anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Opponents have said leave policies should be left to employers, not mandated by the government. They cite tax burdens and staff vacancies that employers have to carry when employees take time off. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan provides paid leave for his staff but refuses to sign the FAMILY bill, according to the Huffington Post.

“Paid time off should not be a luxury,” says Goldin. “It should be a basic right that we’re all receiving.”

On July 30, a paid family and medical leave bill in Massachusetts passed in the state Senate, but did not come to a vote in the House, missing the mark for this legislative session.

As states pass family leave laws they are serving as a testing ground for crafting legislation that actually serves its intended beneficiaries.

States have struggled with implementation and awareness and bridging the benefit gap between high-income and low-income jobs. Some paid leave laws, as Amy Lieberman reported in a recent article in Women’s eNews, are also considered unattractive for workers when they fail to provide job security.

Claims Brushed Off

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, a longtime activist on the issues, recently brushed off Ivanka Trump’s claims that her father would be a serious defender of these issues. Rowe-Finkbeiner is the co-founder and executive director at MomsRising, a national grassroots nonprofit organization that she co-founded with Joan Blades in 2006, with the intention of building a voting bloc around work-family balance issues.

In the decade since then, 35 cities around the country have passed laws giving 11 million more people access to paid sick days, according to Family Values @ Work. Eight more cities in five states passed laws in the past year: Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Plainfield, Spokane, Minneapolis, San Diego and Chicago.

Other cities and states around the nation have begun to follow suit. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is putting a paid sick leave ordinance before voters this fall that would benefit 107,000 workers citywide.

Beyond the humanitarian goal of enabling parents to take better care of children, those arguing in favor of earned sick days cite an array of broad economic benefits, from reducing turnover, especially at small businesses, to maintaining a healthy workplace environment.

Related issues of affordable child care are also gaining leverage with the elections. Many families, according to research by ChildCare Aware of America on parents and the high cost of child care, are caught in a bind. They cannot afford quality day care but they also do not have the means to stay home without any earnings.

On the other side of the equation, those providing child care also struggle as this workforce is widely underrated and many early childhood educators are not making a living wage, according to a recent government report.

]]>Suicides Put California Women’s Prison Under Mental Health Scrutinyhttps://womensenews.org/2016/08/suicides-put-california-womens-prison-under-mental-health-scrutiny/
https://womensenews.org/2016/08/suicides-put-california-womens-prison-under-mental-health-scrutiny/#commentsMon, 01 Aug 2016 08:00:28 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=683155SAN JOSE, California (WOMENSENEWS)— On June 1, when the phone rang at 6:30 in the morning, Sheri Graves thought it was her daughter, 27-year-old Shaylene, making her daily call from prison.

But Shaylene’s bubbly greeting wasn’t on the other end of the phone. It was a prison official, calling to tell her that her daughter had committed suicide the night before in her cell.

“I couldn’t believe it because I had just spoken to Shaylene and we were planning her release party, she was six weeks away from being let out of prison,” says Sheri Graves, 50, who lives in Jurupa Valley, California.

But inside prison Shaylene Graves, who had been serving time for being the driver in an armed robbery in 2008, was having problems with her cellmate in the days leading up to her death.

“Shaylene’s friends have called me from inside the prison telling me that she asked repeatedly to be moved from the room with the new cellmate. But no one listened,” says Sheri Graves.

Shaylene Graves’ death occurred in the California Institution for Women, or CIW, a crowded, all-female facility in Corona, in the southern part of the state.

Hers is the second known suicide this year at the facility, which has 1,882 inmates. CIW was criticized in January by a statewide audit for mishandling the mental health care of its prisoners, a group that has been found, nationally, to suffer a strikingly higher rate of disorders.

By June 1 at least 10 other women at the same prison had attempted to kill themselves so far this year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a prison advocacy group, says in 2015 the suicide rate at CIW was more than eight times the national rate for people in women’s prisons and more than five times the rate for all California prisons.

The only other all-female prison in the state, the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, has more inmates, an average of about 2,800 prisoners a month. It saw no suicides and 11 attempts in the same 13-month period, according to the same data tool.

Folsom State Prison, which houses male and female prisoners, saw one suicide and one attempt among its approximately 500 female inmates.

Suicide Attempts Data Unclear

The actual number of suicide attempts are lower than what is reported on the data tool, Vicky Waters, a spokesperson for the state prison authority, tells Women’s eNews, because cases “are evaluated thoroughly to determine treatments needed for the inmate, and in those evaluations, the attempt may be re-classified, hence the difference in some of the numbers.”

However, advocates at the California Coalition for Women Prisoners say the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation actually underreports suicide attempts. Members of the grassroots coalition, based in San Francisco, are both inside and outside prison. Part of its mission is to follow up on suicides and attempted suicides and meet with inmates.

Through an online petition, the group is asking California Gov. Jerry Brown and a State Senate committee to investigate “the ongoing failure of CIW and CDCR to prevent these tragic and untimely deaths.” More than 13,500 have signed the petition.

In January 2016, a court-ordered suicide prevention audit of 18 California prisons concluded that the California Institution for Women “continued to be a problematic institution that exhibited numerous poor practices in the area of suicide prevention.”

Lindsay Hayes, a nationally recognized expert in the field of suicide prevention within jails, prisons and juvenile detention, performed the audit. By court order he has monitored suicide prevention practices at other prisons in the state.

His report also found that staff at the California Institution for Women recorded more than 400 emergency mental health referrals for suicidal behavior in a six-month period in 2015, only nine of which entered the mental health tracking system.

The staggering disparity in the data indicates that staff was not completing required forms to refer inmates for mental health services, Hayes found.

In an email response, Waters, the spokesperson for the state prison authority, said prison staff is improving the way they log and keep records, including the ones criticized by the Hayes report.

‘Not Doing Enough’

Colby Lenz, a Los Angeles-based legal advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, says the prison is still not doing enough to address administrative problems and staff attitudes. She says inmates at the California Institution for Women and other prisons have told her that if they complain about the conditions in their cell or say they will commit suicide, officers won’t believe them. Instead of finding help, women who reach out risk getting barred from group programs, losing telephone privileges and spending almost all of their time in their cells, segregated from other people.

Lenz points to the case of Kathy Auclair, who tried to hang herself in the shower inside the California Institution for Women on April 21. She had had a history of mental health problems and had recently been on suicide watch.

Lenz met with Auclair after the suicide attempt and says Auclair asked nine correctional officers for help and told three other officers she was going to hurt herself. Instead of referring her to a mental health specialist, they put her in an isolated cell.

“Kathy’s requests were not taken seriously and finally she couldn’t take it anymore,” says Lenz.

Auclair was put in medical isolation after her failed suicide attempt. “That kind of isolation is not what someone who just attempted suicide needs,” says Lenz. “Kathy lost 18 pounds in three weeks after the [attempted suicide] incident and while in medical isolation.”

Waters did not comment on Auclair’s case or on any other specific prisoner cases, citing privacy requirements. “Specific information on patient’s medical records… is protected under the federal law HIPAA,” Waters said, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act.

Lenz says there is also a problem when inmates “finish up” a course of treatment and stop seeing a mental health specialist. If they develop new issues, she says, they often rely on prison guards to relay their problems, which doesn’t work. “Many of the women are practically begging to get treatment, but many guards just pass it off as the women using mental illness excuses to get attention or be manipulative,” says Lenz.

The Correctional Department’s mental health policy manual allows inmates to seek a clinical interview to discuss their mental health needs. And these “self-referrals” are supposed to be collected on a daily basis from each housing unit and processed the same way as correctional staff referrals.

Waters, of the prison authority, says both custody and mental health staff at the California Institution for Women meet monthly to review and address incidents of self-harm and suicide. “All custody, mental health and medical personnel have received additional training on suicide prevention and early warning signs and symptoms,” she says.

Coleman v. Brown

Michael Bien, a legal advocate for better mental health treatment of prisoners, was a lead attorney in Coleman v. Brown, a 1995 class action lawsuit between a group of prisoners with severe mental disorders and the state of California. The judge in the case determined that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was not providing adequate care to prisoners with mental illness.

The case is ongoing with a special representative designated by the court to monitor and report on the Corrections Department’s compliance with the court order.

“Ninety percent of contact with prisoners is with correctional staff and these people get no clinical training. They are taught to be tough and restrain inmates,” Bien says.

Correctional officers are not allowed to make judgements on suicidality and must record and report any information they hear or see, Bien says. State policy says all staff must refer an inmate for mental health services if “an inmate verbalizes thoughts of suicide or self-harm behavior.”

But prisoners can be inhibited from saying anything. “Guards make it unpleasant for people who talk about suicide. It is a way of discouraging people to come forward,” Bien says.

Bien adds that it’s tough to change attitudes and the culture inside prisons, especially when those changes are being ordered by a court.

Lenz and Bien both say crowding at the California Institution for Women, as in most California prisons, strains mental health services and worsens the general attitude of staff.

The California Institution for Women is at 135 percent capacity, according to the Corrections Department’s monthly prison population report for July 1.That is slightly under the 137.5 percent mark that a court ordered in 2013 for all California prisons, but Bien says it is too high and beds in the higher levels of mental health services can run short.

The California Institution for Women currently has 118 mental health staff, most of whom are full time, says Waters. But most of them, 71, are psychiatric technicians with limited training and authority. There are four full-time psychiatrists and 22 full-time clinical psychologists.

Avoiding Treatment

Inmates have their own reasons for avoiding treatment. Lenz says that women at CIW have reported being strip searched when they exit or enter their housing units.

The Correction Department’s Waters says these unclothed body searches are not supposed to be conducted if an inmate is to been seen by mental health staff.

“That might be their policy, but it is not their practice,” says Lenz, adding that prisoners have told her that correctional staff can conduct the strip searches if they “deem it necessary.”

The Hayes report also found that inmates in the mental health crisis beds, a mental health treatment facility inside the prison with 24-hour nursing care, were rarely allowed to go outside. Lenz has also witnessed that. Even though state law requires that all inmates have at least 10 hours of yard or outside time a week, she says those in the mental health care beds are rarely allowed yard or outside privileges.

Lenz says prisoners “badly need fresh air and sunlight.”

Family members of Erika Rocha, a 35-year-old woman who was found hanging in her cell on April 14, 2016, say she didn’t receive proper mental health treatment at CIW and that it led to her worsening health and eventual death.

According to her stepmother, Linda Reza, Rocha was scheduled to be released from prison in October.

Rocha was 14 years old when she was charged and convicted of attempted murder in Los Angeles County. At 16 she was sent to an adult prison in Chowchilla California and put in solitary confinement, allegedly to protect her from other inmates. This was Rocha’s first of four indefinite terms in solitary confinement. Officially, solitary confinement is called the Secure Housing Unit, or SHU, but prisoners call it “the hole.”

Lenz says she met Rocha many times over the years. “Erika openly talked about attempting suicide because of the trauma she had suffered as a youth and for being in solitary confinement for so long,” she says.

Reza, Rocha’s 53-year-old stepmother, went to visit her in April 2013. “She had just gotten out from six months in the SHU and she was not right, very panicky and paranoid,” says Reza, who started taking care of Rocha when she was 13. Rocha’s mother died when Rocha was 7 and her father was in and out of prison. “She ended our visit early and I knew the SHU had made her condition worse.”

“A week before she passed she had been released from suicide watch and that is when they changed her medications,” says Reza.

]]>https://womensenews.org/2016/08/suicides-put-california-womens-prison-under-mental-health-scrutiny/feed/1Misogyny Runs Rampant at Republican National Conventionhttps://womensenews.org/2016/07/misogyny-runs-rampant-at-republican-national-convention/
https://womensenews.org/2016/07/misogyny-runs-rampant-at-republican-national-convention/#commentsWed, 20 Jul 2016 21:44:58 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=638072[View the story “Misogyny at the RNC: How Not to Critique a Female Candidate” on Storify]
]]>https://womensenews.org/2016/07/misogyny-runs-rampant-at-republican-national-convention/feed/5With Trump, GOP Builds 2016 Platform out of Splintery Plankshttps://womensenews.org/2016/07/with-trump-gop-builds-2016-platform-out-of-splintery-planks/
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 20:52:35 +0000http://womensenews.org/?p=635182(WOMENSENEWS)— Had Republicans handled things differently on July 18 during the first day of the convention in Cleveland, Ohio, a last-minute bid to block the nomination of Donald Trump might have delivered a surprise ending to the party’s wild primary ride.

But instead a procedural maneuver stirred cries of foul play on the convention floor by an anti-Trump faction and the effort to buck the presumptive nominee failed.

In other first-day business, the newly drafted Republican platform also won final approval at the convention, which runs through July 21.

That leaves Trump at the head of a party with a set of new, controversial platform planks that have been criticized as an over-commitment to a conservative base.

Controversially, the platform committee passed an amendment that supports gay conversion therapy for minors, which has been largely discredited as harmful to a child’s mental health.

California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom published a series of tweets to critique Trump’s claim to fight for the freedom of the LGBT community. His responses covered a range of topics, from the GOP platform to Trump’s VP pick.

You picked a man who wanted to take money from hiv/aids programs and give it to conversion therapy. Torture. Abuse. https://t.co/7ZOZzx8GSo

Platform delegates were deeply divided over LGBTQ rights. In the end, they failed to adopt language that would have acknowledged LGBTQ communities as targets of violence by ISIS.

They were also unmoved on marriage equality. Support of “traditional marriage” between a man and a woman survived with a considerable majority.

Opposition to women in military combat roles also survived a vote. Supporters of the language said it is meant to keep women and troops in combat safe, stirring the pot on what many consider a decided matter when the U.S. secretary of defense rescinded the policy in 2015.

Abortion Opposition Ironclad

The party’s opposition to abortion was unquestioned. Not only was the issue not even raised in platform discussions, Trump’s choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to be his running mate, an extreme opponent of abortion, confirmed the party’s stance.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced in May the three party leaders to serve as chairman and co-chairs of their platform committee: Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming as chairman; and Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma as co-chairs. Each leader has experience in various levels of Republican policy-making at the Senate, House and state levels. The rest of the committee is made up of one man and one woman from each state and territory.

While not binding on individual politicians, platforms formalize the direction of the political parties by showcasing major institutional beliefs and outlining priorities and policies. They are updated every four years.

The platform embraces Trump’s most notorious campaign promise to build a wall stretching along the entire southern border of the U.S. in an amendment written by Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration activist who serves as the secretary of state of Kansas.

Contrary to Trump’s assertions on the campaign, the amendment makes no call for Mexico to pay for the wall. The Republican platform now also uses the team “illegal aliens” instead of “illegal immigrants.” Critics of this change say the term “alien” is outdated and dehumanizing, and prefer “undocumented” to “illegal.”

Trump’s ideology made another appearance when the committee specified support for five-year minimum sentencing for anyone attempting to return to the United States after being deported.

The committee rejected any regulations on gun magazine capacity and assault rifle sales.

In recent years, the national conventions have been a predictable stop on the route to the November general elections and have stirred little notice. That’s because in 1968 delegates at the conventions became bound to carry out the results of the primaries, instead of wielding their own wills.

After holding two voice votes–instead of a counted roll call–Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas declared twice that the “ayes” to approve the rules won out. Chaos reportedly followed, with delegates opposed to Trump fuming at the lack of a proper vote and some Colorado delegates storming off the floor.

Nominees Exert Influence

Presidential nominees often exert major influence over the platform and, by extension, partisan identities.

When Reagan won an anti-abortion plank in 1980, for instance, he set the stage for an environment that became increasingly hostile to pro-choice members. He also solidified several central tenants of an enduring value structure, such as tax cuts for the wealthy and reduced welfare spending.

But, nominees can also diverge in decisive ways from the platform committee. When John McCain ran in 2008 and supported exemptions to an abortion ban for cases of rape, incest and health of the mother, the party establishment refused to include that in the platform, citing “political suicide.”

In this tumultuous cycle, Donald Trump diverged from the traditional GOP line on issues of supporting funding Planned Parenthood and banning Muslim immigration, among others. Trump appeals to the white working class, but doesn’t have the conservative credentials around small government one would expect from the GOP nominee.

As he moved closer to the convention he caused backlash and defections within the party and its leading pundits.

George Will, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post and supporter of the “Never Trump” movement, and Republican strategist Mary Matalin have both left the party. Some are going as far as advocating that voters refuse to cast their ballots for Trump. “Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House,” Will said.

As Trump clashes with the party establishment on issues across the board, the havoc could hurt his chances of a victory in the fall. But it also strengthens his anti-establishment persona, which won over enough GOP primary voters to make him the party’s standard-bearer.